Our Role & Impact

Inaugural International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference, New York, 16-19 September 2015

Inaugural International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference, New York, 16-19 September 2015

Funding is requested to attend the Inaugural International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference, September 16 -19, 2015, in New York, New York, USA.

This conference is jointly sponsored by the Cancer Research Institute, Association for Cancer Immunotherapy, European Academy of Tumor Immunology and American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and will bring together leaders in the fields of immunology and immunotherapy to disseminate and discuss recent research discoveries to scientists, clinicians, drug developers, and patient advocates.

Attending this immunology / immunotherapy focus meeting will provide an unparalleled opportunity to learn of the results of immunotherapy clinical trials prior to publication. The latest advances in understanding of the immune response, discovery of predictive immune biomarkers, and the development of improved immune stimulant therapies will also be presented. Learning of the advances in these areas will enable refinement of the SNOG pre-clinical immunotherapy program and implementation of optimal strategies.

A novel immunotherapeutic approach (autologous vaccine) developed in my laboratory has recently been published in an AACR journal (Reference 1 below) and re-published in a Brain Cancer Research focus issue by AACR. This conference will provide an opportunity to discuss this research with experts in this area including Dr Glenn Dranoff, the Editor-in-Chief who accepted my lab’s work for publication and is now the Global Head of Exploratory Immuno-oncology at Novartis as well as Dr Robert Schreiber, Washington University, who will present on personalising cancer immunotherapy.

The SNOG research group which I direct with A/Prof Helen Wheeler is currently reviewing different immunotherapeutic approaches that may be combined with the vaccine for our immunotherapy program. This focused meeting will provide new unpublished data on a number of different modalities, some of which we may not have considered to date. The presence of experts in these areas at this small focus meeting will enable discussions and networking simply not possible by email from Australia. These networking opportunities will benefit the SNOG program and may lead to future collaborations for SNOG.